Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am glad that's all the Member has. That's quite a long list. Let me just go back to the main ones that I noted.
In terms of the inspections of baggage and so on, on aircraft, that is the responsibility of the Canadian Air Transport Security Agency. It's not our responsibility. They are doing it. They are checking all luggage at 89 airports across Canada. The only one in the NWT will be Yellowknife. They won't be doing all the little ones, it's too expensive.
With regard to the work hours for our crews, all of the crews across the Territories are on call 24 hours a day. They don't work 8:00 to 5:00. They will work as the demands are there. It's the call of the camp foreman to decide when the people have to be out on the road. We have good experienced, long-time people who are responsible and I see them out on the road. I do drive on Highway No. 3 as well as Highway No. 4 fairly frequently to have a look at what the road conditions are. They are out there. I realize they can't be everywhere at once, but the balance they put in is fairly good. So we appreciate the work that those people do. In fact, many of them are very flexible. We've had times when the superintendent himself is out operating a grader because they need to have extra people. There's a limit to what we can do in terms of cost, but generally we can expect conditions to be worse in the winter and our guys do a good job there.
On the Detah ice road, that one has always been there. It's not a high maintenance thing. We put the road in in the winter. It was like that when airports were transferred to us in 1984. That was long after the Ingraham Trail and so on was built, so it wasn't something that just happened before Highway No. 4 was there. It's been there for a long, long time. We just continued it.
Taking it away from Detah, I don't know what purpose that would serve. We do make the same service available to other communities. We will consider it anywhere. I am open to that. Some of them have historically been done, for example, the road at Hay River that Mr. McLeod was referring to earlier. That's been done by the town and the band. There has never been any request for us to become involved in that. We are open, though. So we will help the communities where we can.
In terms of the bison issues, we are working with a committee that involves RWED staff in Fort Providence to look at ways of making the road safer, given the number of bison along that road at times. The committee includes their biologists and they are looking at the way other jurisdictions are handling it across North America. I hadn't thought of hitting the bison with paintballs, but maybe that's a way. Maybe we can hang reflectors on them or something.
We are open to trying to keep that road safe and also keep the bison safe. Signs, we are working on, as a result of the Member's recommendations and the committee's recommendations. We want to improve our signs. I think Mr. Lafferty's suggestion to having a sign up to indicate that there are new signs coming up, we can do that. We'll take a look at it.
In terms of the chipsealing that we've done, we've done as much upgrading as we could. I know it wasn't done as completely as we would have liked, given the shortage of money, but we did what we could in terms of building a better
base on all the roads before we chipsealed. In some cases, not as much as we would have ideally liked was done.
On the Rae access road, that one was a resealing project, it wasn't a new chipseal. If there are any problems with it, those will show up in the spring and the contractor who did it will be responsible through the warranty to make those repairs. I think I have gotten most of the comments. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
